Le Présent: Connaître (to know / be familiar with)

Connaître is the second of the two French verbs that translate the English word know. Where savoir covers facts, skills, and information, connaître covers acquaintance: people you have met, places you have been, books you have read, paintings you can recognize. The verb is everywhere in everyday speech — Tu connais ce restaurant ?, Je connais quelqu'un qui..., Vous connaissez Marseille ? — and its conjugation pattern unlocks an entire family of verbs (paraître, apparaître, disparaître, reconnaître).

This page lays out the paradigm with phonetic detail, walks through the famous circumflex on il connaît and the 1990 spelling reform, surveys the four core uses, and previews the connaître/savoir split that the savoir page covers from the other side.

The paradigm

Connaître is a 3e-groupe verb with two stems: connai- in the singular and connaiss- in the plural. The doubled s in the plural is what differentiates this verb family from others.

The three singular forms are pronounced identically — /kɔnɛ/ — even though je connais and il connaît differ visually (one carries a circumflex, the others do not). This audible identity is normal for 3e-groupe verbs in the present, and it is part of why subject pronouns are mandatory in French.

The circumflex on il connaît

This is one of the most photographed accents in French grammar: il connaît, with a circumflex on the î. The accent is not decorative — it preserves the historical memory of a vowel-plus-s combination that existed in Old French and was lost when the s fell silent. The same pattern shows up in many French words: maître (master, from maistre), fenêtre (window, from fenestre), forêt (forest, from forest), hôpital (hospital, from hospital).

In connaître, the circumflex appears in two places:

• The infinitive itself: connaître
• The 3sg present: il connaît

It does not appear in the 1sg/2sg present (je connais, tu connais) because those forms have no underlying -st- sequence to mark.

The 1990 spelling reform

The Rectifications orthographiques of 1990 — a sweeping but optional update to French spelling — explicitly authorize dropping the circumflex on i and u when it is not needed to distinguish two words. So under the reform, connait (no circumflex) is officially correct, alongside the traditional connaît.

In practice:

• Traditional spelling (il connaît): still preferred in formal writing, literary publications, and most newspapers.
• Reformed spelling (il connait): increasingly common in school textbooks, technical documents, and informal writing — but still feels slightly bureaucratic to many native readers.

For learners, the safe default is the traditional spelling with the circumflex: it is always correct, it is what most published texts use, and it gives you the historical insight into French orthography. The reform is an option, not a replacement.

Use 1 — Knowing a person

This is the canonical use of connaître: being acquainted with someone, having met them, knowing who they are. Savoir cannot be used here at all; je sais Marie is ungrammatical, full stop.

A useful nuance: connaître covers a wide range of acquaintance, from "I have met them once" to "they are a close friend." French distinguishes the depth of acquaintance with adverbs: je connais bien Marc (I know Marc well), je connais Marc de vue (I know Marc by sight), je connais Marc de réputation (I know of Marc).

Use 2 — Knowing a place

Connaître is the verb for being familiar with a city, region, country, or specific location:

The phrase je connais X with a place name often translates English "I have been to X" — French does not need the past tense to express the experience of having visited. Je connais Tokyo means "I have been to Tokyo and am familiar with it." If you want to say specifically that you went last year, use the passé composé of aller or visiter (je suis allé à Tokyo l'année dernière).

Use 3 — Knowing a work, thing, or topic

Books, films, songs, paintings, recipes, theories — anything you can be familiar with as a thing in the world — take connaître:

For works specifically, this contrasts with savoir: je sais cette chanson would mean "I know this song by heart, I can sing it" (as a memorized fact), while je connais cette chanson means "I am familiar with this song, I have heard it." Both are possible, but they are not synonyms.

Use 4 — Meeting for the first time (passé composé)

In the passé composé, connaître shifts meaning. J'ai connu does not mean "I knew" — it means "I met (for the first time)" or "I came to know":

For "I knew" — the ongoing state of being acquainted — you use the imparfait: je connaissais. This aspectual split is identical to savoir/j'ai su and is one of the most reliable transfer-error sources for English speakers.

The -aître family

The conjugation of connaître is a template. Every verb ending in -aître (with the same circumflex pattern) follows it exactly:

All of these inflect identically: je reconnais, tu reconnais, il reconnaît, nous reconnaissons, vous reconnaissez, ils reconnaissent. Once you have memorized the connaître paradigm, you have memorized seven verbs.

The verb naître (to be born) follows the same conjugation pattern in the present (il naît) but is only used in compound tenses for past events: je suis né(e) en 1995 (I was born in 1995).

Il paraît que — the rumor verb

A useful spinoff: the impersonal expression il paraît que + indicative means "apparently" or "I hear that." It is the standard way of reporting a rumor or hearsay in French:

This expression is one of the highest-frequency uses of any -aître verb. Learn it as a chunk.

Connaître vs savoir — the four-square test

When in doubt, ask yourself two questions:

1. What is the object? A person/place/work → connaître. A fact/skill/information → savoir.
2. What follows? A noun phrase → connaître. A que-clause, a question word, or an infinitive → savoir.

The two verbs almost never overlap. The classic exception is the song-by-heart contrast above, where both are possible with different meanings.

A note on register

Connaître is fully neutral — it works equally well in casual conversation, formal speech, and academic writing. Unlike English to be acquainted with (which sounds stiff) or to know (which can be ambiguous), connaître simply names the relation of familiarity without any register coloring.

The fixed expression enchanté(e) de faire votre connaissance (literally "delighted to make your acquaintance") is the formal way to acknowledge a first meeting. The shorter enchanté(e) is the everyday version, used at any first introduction.

Common Mistakes

Mistake 1: Using connaître before a que-clause or question word.

Mistake 2: Using savoir with a person.

Mistake 3: Translating "I knew (him) for years" with j'ai connu.

Mistake 4: Forgetting the doubled s in plural forms.

Mistake 5: Pronouncing the silent endings.

Mistake 6: Dropping the circumflex on il connaît in formal writing.

Key takeaways

Connaître is the verb of acquaintance: people, places, works, and topics you are familiar with. Its singular and plural stems differ (connai-/connaiss-), and the famous circumflex on il connaît preserves the memory of a lost s. The entire -aître family — paraître, apparaître, disparaître, reconnaître — conjugates by the same template, so memorizing this one verb gives you seven for free.

Together with savoir, connaître covers the cognitive map of French knowledge. Drill the two verbs as a pair, and the split that troubles English speakers will become second nature.